14 DAY TRIAL // You'd think that NVIDIA, a proponent of tablets with console-like graphics, would be more prone towards optimism when it comes to consoles themselves, but that isn't the case.
Not that it's a surprise. NVIDIA doesn't have any stake in the game console industry – AMD has rather handily secured that area.
So instead of considering how such devices could handle high-graphics games, NVIDIA is talking more about how they'll never measure up to PCs.
Recently, in an interview with the PC PowerPlay website, Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of Nvidia, said that “there is no way a 200W Xbox is going to be beat a 1000W PC.”
“Nvidia spends $1.5 billion per year on research and development in graphics, every year, and in the course of a console’s lifecycle we will spend over 10 billion dollars into graphics research. Sony and Microsoft simply cannot afford to spend that kind of money. […] [Consoles are] always going to be less capable than a PC, where we spend 250W just on the GPU.”
We can't really dispute that, but NVIDIA makes it sound like console graphics are visibly weaker than PC ones. We admit it might be visible on huge, 4K displays, at high resolutions, and on multi-screen setups, but on most TVs and monitors, console games look just fine.